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ON OBITUARY PAGE, EPIDEMIC'S TOLL

More and more, grieving families tell of lives lost to addiction

By Todd Feathers, tfeathers@lowellsun.com

Updated:
11/02/2015 08:09:26 AM EST

It's been less than two weeks. Posterboards from the wake, covered with hundreds of photographs of a smiling Robbie Goodell, still sit in the immaculate, dimly lit living room of the family's Tewksbury home.

In the kitchen, Steven and Lois Goodell have a pile of laminated thank-you cards with a picture of Robbie on the front, which they plan to send to everyone who attended his wake. Hundreds showed up. They all knew about the disease that had plagued the handsome, 21-year-old, multisport athlete. It was no secret that heroin had taken his life early in the morning of Oct. 19.

Addiction was a disease that took away Robbie's choice, and so in his death, his parents made the only choice they could stomach: not to hide the reality of his last two years.

They acknowledged his struggle in his obituary.

On Facebook, Lois wrote "We were robbed. The thief is Heroin."

"This epidemic is wiping out my son's generation," she said Wednesday. "And the more people that talk about it, maybe we'll be able to save more people, more kids."

The annual death toll from opiate addiction has nearly quadrupled since 2000, and more people are talking about it.

Not one obit published from 2000 to 2007, in the dozens of Massachusetts newspapers that store their death notices on Legacy.com, acknowledging that death was a result of addiction appeared.

From 2008 to 2014, 49 such obituaries appeared in newspapers across the state.

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In 2015, with two months left in the year, 44 obituaries have mentioned death by addiction.

"I don't believe in the stigma of the disease, so I wasn't going to put in that he died suddenly or unexpectedly," said Gwen Phelps, of Westminster.

Her son, Jacob, died of an overdose on Dec. 10, 2014, when he was 24 years old. Now, she keeps a newspaper clipping of Jacob's obituary in the treasured Bible she received on her wedding day.

"Some still think, 'Oh, they're a loser, it was their choice,' " Phelps said.

"I had already come to the realization that it wasn't a personal trait for him. He wasn't a bad person. It was a disease."

The emotional pain of that stigma, the fear of being publicly outed, keeps most families silent. It is one of the greatest barriers stopping them from seeking out treatment services or asking for comfort as they watch their children deteriorate, said Wilson Palacios, a sociology and criminology professor at UMass Lowell.

"Families are just trying to make sense of what happened," he said. "When the general public thinks about (addiction), they tend to moralize it, think about the myths of who uses substances."

Myths like the dirty junkie in the alley, the deviant whose family didn't love her.

Vicki Keith loved her children, and even at their darkest points they and their friends could find a place to stay at her Tyngsboro townhouse. She is a Christian, a teacher, the kind of mother who made her children sew blankets for battered women.

Her son, Daniel "Bugsy" Ruane, still died from a heroin overdose on Dec. 13, 2012, at the age of 23.

"They don't do it to get high. They're not having fun," said Keith, who now lives in Nashua. "He hated himself for doing it. He hated that heroin owned him."

She saw Daniel so weak from opiate withdrawals that he had to crawl up the stairs. She heard the clink of shackles as he stood behind plexiglass at Lowell District Court. She hugged him when he was clean, as he told her how much he loved her. Sometimes, she felt relief that he had a different last name than hers when his arrests appeared in the paper.

For nearly a decade, addiction was a presence in her home. One of her three children died from it, one is three years clean, one never touched heroin.

"I remember being angry that it was suggested that I put 'suddenly' or 'unexpectedly' " in Daniel's obituary, Keith said. Because it didn't come out of the blue, and she shouldn't have to hide from it.

"My children were perfect too, all three of them. They played soccer, they did well in school, and it still happened."

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